{ "episodeId": "SLP656", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "leon_wankum": { "name": "Leon Wankum", "role": "guest", "tag": "LEON" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:12", "start": 12.11, "text": "Hi everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast, brought to you by Bold. For American listeners, you can buy and sell Bitcoin over at getbold.io. Now, joining me on the show today is a property expert who's gone down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. He is Leon Wankum. He is head of Bitcoin strategies at Onevest, which, as I understand And is a property development, company. And, yeah, well, first off, welcome to the show, Leon." }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "00:36", "start": 35.72, "text": "Thanks for having me. Good to see you. So, Leon," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:38", "start": 37.79, "text": "I know you and I were, I think we were both guests on another show a little while back as well, but, I know you've been, doing a lot of good work out there in terms of teaching, let's say, property investors why they need to take Bitcoin seriously. So, do you wanna just take a minute or two, give people a bit of a background" }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "01:00", "start": 60.5, "text": "And then I go into real estate because I, studied philosophy around a decade ago, and then I learned about Bitcoin through a friend of mine, and I had an interest in it, not as an investment or even as a savings vehicle, but as a I guess decentralized network for, electronic cash. And then I learned about Austrian economics, I learned about the cypherpunks, and I fell down that rabbit hole. But I didn't take Bitcoin serious yet as a store of value, and I was interested in real estate as a career path, and I didn't really think about Bitcoin as a career path. So I wrote my master thesis about Bitcoin. Studying financial economics for my master's, and then I went into, the real estate world, the real estate business. I joined a property developer, and I'm still working at the same company. And the company is developing residential real estate, but we're doing it on a commercial scale at this point. So we started with, Multi-family, apartments, multi-family unit, apartment buildings, and then now we are developing larger apartment buildings, up to three hundred apartments per project. And, while working in real estate, I always, I, I, I stacked sets on the one side, and I also observed, the, the Bitcoin scene, but from the sidelines. I listened to a few podcasts, I went to some conferences, but I didn't- Really merge both real estate and Bitcoin, and that changed like five years ago when I really understood how our monetary system works in detail, because I have to be honest with you, it took me almost half a decade of being interested in real estate and Bitcoin to really understand how the monetary system works and to also understand why the real estate business benefits from inflation and why low interest rates lead to liquidity that drives up property prices. And, that also helped me to understand that Bitcoin as a digital store of value that also benefits from its scarcity in the face of inflation, on the face of monetary inflation, might be a better store of value to real estate. And then again, that took me a few years to fight with my ego to really understand that. But over the past couple of years, what I basically came to understand is that Bitcoin is a digital store of value, and that means that its competition to real estate, which is being used- Used as such, but it doesn't mean that developing real estate, the business model of developing real estate will go away, but it does mean that the speculation that drives the real estate market, and that's also based on low interest rates that are part of the fiat system, I think that will change. And over time, I think it's very good to integrate Bitcoin into property investing, and with property investing, I mean property development. So I'm not talking about purely- speculative investing into rentals and to outperform inflation, I'm actually talking about the, the, the business of, buying land, working together with an architecture and then actually providing and, p-property as a finished, service where people can live or people can use it for production or event spaces or whatever they want to." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:21", "start": 260.53, "text": "Great summary, great overview there, and I wanna go further into this concept around the speculation involved in the property market, and of course, the monetary premium. And I, I know you've been talking about this recently as well. So it'd be good if you could outline for listeners Why is it that there is this monetary premium that's almost baked into real estate prices in many markets around the world?" }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "04:47", "start": 286.8, "text": "Yeah. it is actually the level of financialization of the asset class, real estate, when we look at the history of humankind isn't normal. So working in real estate, it's kind of tough sometimes to take a bird's eye view and look at the asset class and then, think about how the asset class was used in the past, and I wanna give a quick example. It's a picture that, Jeff Boeve posted on Nostra recently, and I've been talking about this quite a bit because it very much exemplifies the changes that the fiat system brought to housing. So if you look at the price of, of a building in the US, the average price of a home was around four thousand dollars in nineteen forty-four And today it's over four hundred thousand dollars. Now the question is why did that happen? And the reason for that is that real estate and land is scarce and money in an inflationary system is abundant. So as more money enters into the system, people look for, look for scarce assets to invest in And real estate is especially interesting for two reasons. Number one, the scarcity of land, but number two, you can lend money to buy property. So banks like to give out money to property investors because they count on the rental income to pay back the money that they lent out, and that's the business model. You create money, you lend it out, you take an interest rate. That's the fiat central banking business model. So I think that the reason that, real estate is used as Money today, because when we talk about the monetary premium, what we actually mean is all the money that's invested in real estate because fiat money is a bad store of value. So real estate took on the role of being money, and we use it as such, and we use it, as, actually the dominant form of, preserving wealth. That's true across many, many cultures. That's true across many jurisdictions. There are tax benefits. Across many jurisdictions for real estate, because, states understand that if the value is held in property, it's also a bit easier to confiscate. So I think that over time that might also change, because recently I had discussions with friends of mine that work in real estate, and they do understand the investment thesis behind Bitcoin being very similar to the investment thesis behind, real estate, but they don't really understand And my, enthusiasm for, for Bitcoin, or they think that I'm a bit too bullish, right? But, I think what they m- miss to understand is that the tax advantages that exist around real estate right now, that could also switch quickly once nation states or some nation states understand that if you want your population To not be negatively affected by inflation, you want actually, you want them to hold stores of value that maintain and preserve value over time without taxing them, right? So I think that the moment the tax advantages that exist around real estate, the moment they will also exist around Bitcoin, I think that, that will be a shift because at that time Property investors will likely also consider Bitcoin as a superior investment, not just because of its absolute scarcity, because if you work in real estate and you understand that people want to own real estate because it's scarce And that Bitcoin is much scarcer than real estate, so Bitcoin is superior in that perspective. But once you also understand that maybe it's tax, tax benefit in storing your wealth in, in Bitcoin, I think that can also bring a shift, because right now, it's true that the tax benefits, especially in the United States, that exist around real estate, make it an interesting investment within the scope of the fiat system, but once that scope changes, and- And I think it's going to change because we can see the changes right now, and I think Bitcoin will also, in that perspective, become, interesting to many." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:04", "start": 543.6, "text": "Yeah, and a-as you point out, there are these various, not just tax, but in various institutional advantages in the fiat system for investing in property, right? It's easy, it's comparatively easy to go and get debt to lever up on property, and it's almost-- in the Western world, I would say it's seen as almost the default script, the default thing And the young people are told to do is, okay, study hard, go to university, get a good job, what's next? Oh, get a mortgage, right? That's the, that's the standard story that everybody is told in the Western world, and many people follow that script. It's almost like they're just kind of on the, on the conveyor belt, oh, this is the next step in the journey. And so- Society has been, in a way, constructed with that as the pathway for people, and so because of that, people are getting essentially fiat subsidized loans. They're getting cheaper loans than they otherwise would have if we lived in a true hard money, sound money world. You know, the interest rates wouldn't be that cheap, and they wouldn't be-- you know, it might not necessarily be that easy to go and get this kind of mortgage credit as a young man, let's say, you, you know, twenty-two years old or maybe twenty-five years old out of university We've been working for a few years, save up for the deposit, and enter into a massive property debt, and for many people, that's the biggest purchase they'll make in their lives, and yet that is the system. And then On the downside, there are social consequences to this too, because now people are-- younger generations feel like they're kind of locked out of the property market or the multiple of the property price to their annual salary has just, it's really expanded in various countries around the world. I'm curious if you have any thought, on that, social consequence of, you know, the system that has been-- that has existed for decades now in the Western world." }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "10:54", "start": 653.7, "text": "Yeah. I personally actually, when I left university, so I left- University around, ten years ago, and my mindset was also get into property investing, because I was aware of inflation. I didn't particularly understand the intricacies of it, but I did understand the concept of owning something that is scarce in the face of inflation. So I did understand, you know, going to property investing. But once I, I got into property investing, there was around, two thousand sixteen, two thousand seventeen, when I really started to be involved in, the acquisition of Property and also developing property and then also selling finished properties and managing properties. And what dawned on me was that in two thousand eight and two thousand nine, we had the financial crisis, and as a response to that, interest rates across the world were lowered to two percent, one percent, and some countries there were even negative. So it was almost like you had to take the money, otherwise you were penalized by having to pay negative interest rate on your money. So people were going out and investing a prop- Property left and right. But when I got into property investment in two thousand sixteen, seventeen seriously, I actually started to also buy Bitcoin on the side, and I started to understand that by buying Bitcoin, it's not just that Bitcoin grows in purchasing power faster than real estate, even if it's bought with borrowed money, because let's say, which is quite high, but let's say on average you have a five percent yield on real estate over time If you take b- on borrowed money and let's say you have a leverage factor of five, your return is five times five, so that's twenty-five percent. But if you buy Bitcoin over the past decade, even if you just put on the savings that you have, you don't borrow money, you outperform And invest, investment in real estate because Bitcoin performs around fifty percent on an annual base. So first of all, I understood, wow, Bitcoin is a better investment, but then I also understood that I have to pay less taxes if I don't sell it, I can just own it outright, I don't have to maintain it because in property you have to pay taxes on the rental income, you have to use the rental income to pay back the debt, you have maintenance costs, so it does sound very nice, but there are Or there is a lot of work that ties into owning real estate, so that helped me also to understand from a social economic perspective, owning Bitcoin as a young individual, as a, as a twenty-three, twenty-four year old at the time, it gives me more freedom. I can move between jurisdictions. Let's say I'm not happy with the way that, I don't know, the government works, and I own Bitcoin, I can just leave the country I'm in. I can't do that with real estate, right? And then also, let's say worst case scenario nineteen thirty three in the, in the US, when the US government confiscated the gold reserves. I mean, much worse things happened in Germany around the same time, and for the German government at the time, it was very easy to confiscate, property of political rivals or minorities they didn't like, and that also can't happen with, with Bitcoin. So I think also in the face of whatever is happening right now globally I think Bitcoin gives you the ability to move around, and I think that, that in itself is a, a value proposition that a real estate doesn't have. And now I'm talking very, very negatively about, about real estate. I do still work in real estate development because the business of real estate development is very different than just speculatively investing in real estate, and it also took some years for me to be able to differentiate between the two. and, and, I think that's something maybe we can- And also talk about later. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:47", "start": 887.39, "text": "yeah, okay. and one other thing, just to-- I, I saw, I think this, this came up in your talk as well, or at least I had a quick look in the slides. You were pointing out how a lot of the real estate value is actually driven by-- Well, is it true then, it's driven by the basement of fiat currency?" }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "15:03", "start": 902.62, "text": "Yes, no, that's very true. That is actually very true. If you look at-- I'm talking about again the US now, if you took-- look on" }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "15:15", "start": 914.69, "text": "71 was around seven percent on average year over year, and if you look at residential real estate, it was around six percent. If you look at commercial real estate, it was around four point and a half percent. So there's a clear trend here. What happens is as the money-- monetary supply expands, people invest their money into real estate, and real estate almost follows the monetary supply one by one. I think that's quite interesting if you actually look at it, and that would not be a problem if we- Wages would grow at the same rate. So in theory, let's say the monetary supply grows around seven percent, real estate grows around six percent, and wages also grow around six percent, then people still have the ability to afford real estate. But what happens is that real estate grows on par with the rate of monetary expansion, but wages do not. So that means that whoever owns assets benefits from inflation, and whoever doesn't doesn't benefit. That means you, number one, you need to own scarce assets, because otherwise you'll just be penalized by the system. In the past, there was gold, that was real estate, but today that's Bitcoin. But what you also need to understand is, if you want to get wealthier, you need to own something else than something that just keeps track with inflation. That's why people borrow money to buy real- real estate, then with the leverage, you can, in theory, outperform the rate of monetary inflation. But with Bitcoin, you can outperform the rate of monetary inflation without leverage, and I think that's pretty interesting. You can take on leverage to buy Bitcoin. I mean, Strategy is doing it, other companies are doing it as well. You can take on leverage if you have a positive cash flow in your company, to buy Bitcoin or even in your property or personally, but I think it's important that you don't need to." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:08", "start": 1027.72, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. This show brought to you by CoinKite dot com, the creators of the best Bitcoin hardware security devices such as the Coldcard Mark IV and the new Coldcard Q. Now, we use Bitcoin hardware security devices to keep our keys offline, our private keys offline. Now, the way these work is you can do that setup, write down your twelve or twenty-four words on those, the seed word cards, and keep that secure. Now, you can use this device to interact with the Bitcoin network Network using software such as Sparrow Wallet, Electrum, or Vector Desktop or Nunchuk as a few examples. Now, you have a range of security features that you can use with these devices such as passphrases. You can use seed x or, or my favorite is multi-signature. Now, if you're starting in a basic way, just start with the device and the USB-C cable, plug it directly to the computer and use it that way, and then later improve your setup. But I believe these devices are great at helping secure your coins. Especially as you start to migrate up into multi-signature security. But don't be disheartened or don't be, scared away. They are accessible, and I think you actually do learn about Bitcoin in the process. So to get yours, go to coinkite dot com, use code levera to get a discount on your cold card. This episode brought to you by Galloy. They are building banking software for the Bitcoin age. So if you are with a bank, a fintech, or a startup looking to offer some kind of Bitcoin product, whether that is a Bitcoin collateralized loan Deposit accounts or payments, Galloy can help you. Their latest product is called Lana. It is a loans management platform, and you can use this to come to market quickly and offer a loans or Bitcoin collateralized lending product for your customers. Now, Galloy have a lot of experience in the space. They started with Blink Wallet in twenty twenty, and they've since grown this to become a community favorite over time, and so they have a lot of experience making things work in a secure, reliable, and scalable way. So if you need assistance coming- To market quickly with a Bitcoin banking product such as lending or deposits or payments, talk to the team at Galloy. You can email them, the email is biz at galloy dot io, or go to the website galloy dot io. And now back to the show. Yeah, I think it's a, a well explained point there around, the debasement that all of us are facing. And so as you say, it kind of creates this weird incentive where the game Is okay, lever up on this thing, and then what we see, and I, I see even when I look back at what's happening in Australia, it's kind of a common thing that people would be encouraged, okay, get, get your starter property, and then once that's gone up a bit, okay, take some equity out of that and roll that into the next property and rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat. And so there's all these kind of stories of, you'll see, you know, real estate news sites talking about, \"Oh, look at this, this twenty-eight It's like they kind of glorify this being a property mogul kind of thing, right? And I know you're-- Obviously, you're, it's to-- and to be fair to you, you're, you're distinguishing between that kind of property speculation and the business of developing property. W-w-Those are separate things, but nevertheless, this is the incentive that has been created. This is what people are sort of encouraged to do, especially if there are tax advantages and things like that. So in the Australian market, there's things called like negative gearing. So basically, people can lose money, money On the property, but they get to take that as a tax deduction and things like this, that it just sort of, it sort of pushes people down that pathway. so maybe do you wanna just explain from your perspective the difference there in terms of being a, let's say, a leveraged speculator on property versus being a Property developer." }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "20:55", "start": 1254.94, "text": "Yes, I, I'll try my best, and I have to say at this point, at both, it, it involves leverage. So because the fiat system at this point, we're at the end of a debt cycle, and any type of business involves leverage, so even real estate development involves leverage, right? So I have to say that both, and, and, and involve leverage. But I'd say one is, and I'll talk about, just speculating in property at this point, that is basically the fight to outperform inflation. Let's assume you would live on a Bitcoin standard, hypothetically speaking. Nobody would have to invest to outperform inflation. People could just save in Bitcoin by default. Bitcoin would have a purchasing power increase that would be lower than today, but let's say global productivity on average increases by five to ten percent a year, Bitcoin Grows at the same rate, you don't need to invest into property, you can just save in Bitcoin. That's, that's saving in itself. And I think because money loses value over time, we kind of have forgot what saving is, and we think that investing is saving. So what you're describing right now is actually, it's a form of saving. It's a form of basically accumulating capital, scarce capital, in the form of real estate to be able to outperform the rate of monetary inflation that exists in the fiat system. And I think why that works so well is because if we talk about the political system globally, we are moving towards socialism in a way, you know, I mean, you can now have a discussion on to what rate, I think as a libertarian, you would agree with me, we went quite far on the left, and I think that the financially elites only agreed to go as far as we went because real estate performed so well. So almost like- I don't know if this is an argument that is a bit too far off, but more recently I came to think that a lot of the financial elites and the wealthy were able to cope with the Socialist tendencies of the West that we went through over the past twenty, thirty years, because property investing in itself was something that was kind of left alone also by the lefties, because it allowed people to still acquire wealth in the face of inflation. But the secondary order- Negative effects of that are very, very obvious. it's very, very expensive, like to rent at the moment. It's difficult to be able to buy a property, which means younger individuals are priced out from saving because owning a property means you can save and not lose money in the face of inflation. So there's different se-negative second order effects of it, but I do understand why people do it. I did it myself. It's a very similar thinking actually to owning- Bitcoin in a way, just reflecting on my own journey. I don't wanna talk about everyone right now, but talking about my own journey, how I got into Bitcoin, why I got interested in, in real estate, investing, is actually, was actually a similar dynamic. I understood I need to do something to outperform inflation. And then now we talk about real estate developing. Real estate developing is a business, and there are many Austrian economists who talked about it. Rothbard, talked about it, Mises talked- talked about it as well. Mises talked about or-originary interest, and the originary interest in his perspective is if you as a entrepreneur, you take on risk And you, you, you, you put up money and you provide a service, and the service in that case, for example, as a real estate developer, that service is housing. So you provide the service of allowing somebody to live and rent your property, and they pay you money for it, and that is called originary interest. And, the rental income then, I think I recently read a bit about how Rothbard would define the average rent, I'm not going to go into it because it's a bit too difficult for me to- Explain at this point, but if people want to read about it, you can read about it. And even on a Bitcoin standard, where on, even on a gold standard, like we can also sometimes, I think it's helpful to look what happened in the past on a gold standard to kind of just visualize what might happen on a Bitcoin standard. And on a gold standard, you still had property and investors and landlords, and they owned property, and they were renting that property out, and the money they get was basically their business income. So that makes real estate a business. And The business of real estate, I think, is changing right now due to the dynamics of Bitcoin being the digitalization of, of value, and I think that we can assume that over time, your mindset and my mindset, which is that Bitcoin is a better store of value than real estate, over time, over the next couple of decades, will spread throughout the world, and the mindset of, you know, houses are a great investment, they'll always go up in value, that might change, on a- Like deflationary standard that Bitcoin might bring, and people might think, you know, Bitcoin is a great savings tool, it always goes up in value, and houses might be potential liabilities, there will be consumer goods like maybe, I would think, I wanted to say like cars today, but cars are actually maybe also collectibles at this moment because scarce cars also are investments that people use, but maybe they're an investment good similar to, a car in the nineteen Fifties or in the 1960s, 1970s. Yeah. Or maybe you would say like" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:24", "start": 1583.92, "text": "specific, maybe you would say like specific cars and specific houses, like maybe beachfront real estate or like really fancy real estate, maybe those ones are in that category, but you would say maybe most properties and most cars are in the, let's say, consumption bucket." }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "26:38", "start": 1598.09, "text": "Exactly, exactly. So I would, that's what I would expect, you know? Like, there was a good example that you just brought about, there's still, you know, people might" }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "26:50", "start": 1610.1, "text": "Properties will always carry certain like subjective premiums that people assign to them because they like it or because it's particularly beautiful, people like the architecture or something like that. But the financialization that exists around the asset class real estate, I think, that's going to move over into Bitcoin, and that's why I think that if you work in real estate development, developing, think, I think like if we think about portfolio theory, if you think about a stock portfolio, and if you're a traditional investor, people start- to understand, you need to allocate two, five, ten percent to Bitcoin. Of course, I think you should allocate more than that to Bitcoin because Bitcoin is going to outperform other equities. But talking about from the perspective of a traditional investor who looks at his portfolio and understands, you know, traditional portfolio theory, you understand if you bring in Bitcoin, which is uncorrelated to other asset classes, you actually dampen the volatility a little bit. And I think if you now construct real- State, you can think about your real estate portfolio in a similar way. So you can add Bitcoin into that, and, you can do it with the rental income by just using your rental income to buy Bitcoin, 'cause Bitcoin is just a great technology to store value, and I think you can help, with, it ha-- it can help with the OpEx and the CapEx, the operation expan- expenditures on real estate is increasing with inflation, and Bitcoin is a way to save rental income to save cash. Flow. And, the last, I think, for me it's the most obvious, but it's the most difficult from a regulatory perspective. I think if you invest into real estate, meaning if you develop a new property, let's say you buy land with the goal of developing a house on it, and you need a loan I ideally would like to take on additional money to buy Bitcoin immediately. So let's say I need a dollar, a million dollars to buy land and then develop the property, I would like to take on an additional Fifty to maybe one hundred thousand dollars and hold it immediately as the treasury asset in the company that then develops the property, because if what we're saying, if what we're saying is true It means, that means that the monetary premium that sits in real estate over time flows into Bitcoin potentially, and if you hold Bitcoin in the same entity that holds the real estate, the property itself, you're basically hed- you're hedging against that, and then you also participate in the value increase of Bitcoin, and you just have a much more resilient company structure. So, yeah, that's how I view both asset classes merging, kind of." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:34", "start": 1774.08, "text": "Interesting. Okay. and so just to give people kind of a flavor, can you give people just an overview of-- of course, I know this varies all around the world, but, it's, as an example, what kind of, Investment yields, capital appreciation, rental yields, what can they expect, you know, in, you know, kind of a well-developed economy, What kind of rates would you, would you sort of, explain when you-- let's say you're explaining to somebody, okay, you're gonna get about this much capital appreciation on average and this much rental yield, let's say, But maybe with leverage you're getting the X amount if you could just give people a rough idea based on the markets you work in." }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "30:15", "start": 1815.23, "text": "Yes, of course. I'll, I'll give you a detail now for, for Germany for the past forty years, and it's similar for the US, there's a similar dynamic. So on average I, I take now the yield on the property as an investment, which includes rental income and the increase of the market price of the property itself. On average, over the past forty years in Germany, it was around three percent. So that was around three percent. And let's assume that you have a million dollars in a property, and you took two hundred thousand dollars of your own money, and you took out a loan, and the, the loan was eight hundred thousand. That means you have a leverage of five." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:53", "start": 1853.33, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "30:54", "start": 1853.73, "text": "Because you took on two hundred thousand, now you have a property worth a million, that means you're three percent on average a year, they add up to fifteen percent. So now your, your return is fifteen percent, including leverage, and I think that is like an average return considering different market cycles, because there are also, there are also market cycles in, in property investing. They aren't four years, they are around eighteen years. it's actually quite interesting if you- You guys want to look into it. I mean, there's something called the 18-year property cycle, and it's interesting because what it basically says is land is scarce Once money was invested in land, it's not gonna flow out of land, right? So over time, land is gonna get more expensive But now we have Bitcoin, so there might actually now be a chance that there is value flowing away from land, flowing into Bitcoin, so the eighteen year property cycle might break as well, and we might converge on a four year halving cycle in the asset class with Bitcoin as well. That is to be, to be seen. but that's the average, return you can expect on a year with leverage. And leverage also means you have to work for the leverage, you have to build a re-relationship with your bank, you have to pay back the debt, and you have to maintain the property, you have to rent it out, which is a job in itself. So I worked in property management for three years. Over the past eight years, just three years of that, I worked in property management, and I can tell you it takes a lot of time. You need" }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "32:32", "start": 1951.76, "text": "It doesn't pay rent, you have to get a lawyer to get the rent, so it takes a lot of time. And with Bitcoin, your, your average return is around fifty percent. So just as a, as a savings, savings tool, Bitcoin outperforms, real estate, even considering leverage. But now I go, I go back, go back into real estate investing. Let's say you-- we talk about specialization of labor a lot in Bitcoin, and I think it applies to real estate as well, because constructing a prop- Property is not easy, so I think division of labor will always mean that there will be certain individuals that work in construction and that also manage construction sites. And let's say my service is I manage a construction site, I find the land, I also, because maybe I have a good relationship with a bank, I can also secure financing That means I can come with zero capital, but I bring my service by being good at constructing properties and having good relationships with banks. So maybe I find someone who puts up the two hundred thousand, dollars. I find a bank that puts up the eight hundred thousand dollars, and then I buy the, the land and construct a property worth a million. So meaning I brought in zero capital, but I brought in my expertise, and for that, maybe I own fifty percent of the building. Right? So, but this can take five years. So this is an investment, I think the investment cycle, I'd say on average for a property is around five years. So from finding the property, securing the financing, getting in the investor, and then actually constructing it, and then you have to rent it out. So that's another two years. So this takes around five to, to seven years. So it's a lot of work, but it's worth it if you understand the business of it. But as a, as a pure store of value, you just have to be honest," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:23", "start": 2063.3, "text": "Yeah, interesting. And so it will have some, yeah, some different impacts, right? As, as we're going through this process, as, as more and more people start to understand, oh, actually, I should be holding Bitcoin, I should be saving with Bitcoin, and when they discover, as you point out, even unlevered Bitcoin is outperforming levered property investments, at least in the, well-developed parts of the world, maybe in kind of like early stage kind of- Property markets, maybe it might be a little bit higher, but the risk is higher, this kind of thing. But I guess here's the other interesting question, and I'm curious to hear how you have gone when you are out there, let's say evangelizing Bitcoin to property investors. What are the normal barriers you find? Is it just that they're more conf- Is it just that real estate invest- is what they know, and that's why they're doing it?" }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "35:18", "start": 2117.88, "text": "Yeah, interesting questions. I have different, I guess the feedback is different and it was, it also changes over time. So Three, four, five years ago, like I'd say like four years ago, I started publishing articles on, on my thoughts on Bitcoin real estate and also shared them with people that I work with, and they were very hesitant to accept my thoughts or even just engage with them, and that changed in 2022 when interest rates came down. liquidity dried out and the troubles in, in the fiat world spread over to real estate because if you work in, Or if you work outside of, of property, investing, I think that, two thousand fifteen, two thousand sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, those were years that weren't particularly good, not particularly bad. The, the global economy was, was recovering, and then in two thousand twenty, when COVID hit People were actually, I think, very stressed. Most people were negatively affected from COVID, but real estate investors were positively affected by it because there was so much money injected into the economy that property prices were just going wild. I mean, it was really wild. In 2020, in 2021, it was wild. So there was little reason to look into Bitcoin, to be very honest with you. And at this point, there are Still, the people that don't really wanna engage with me because, as you said, real estate investing is all they know. maybe they use social media and they use websites to absorb information, but maybe they're not particularly tech savvy. They don't understand how, protocols work. They don't really care, to be honest with you, because they made good money over the past couple of decades, but- There are also other people who really understand, like some people just tell me, \"Wow, like I should stop investing into real estate, I should sell, sell all my rentals and just put the money into Bitcoin.\" And I don't say you shouldn't do it, you can do whatever you want to. I think if you have a property that's paid off, you know, think of, you can think about selling it, putting your money into Bitcoin, it's definitely a better use of your capital. and there are people that slowly- Start to understand what Bitcoin has to offer to them as a monetary technology, because most real estate investors they dismiss fiat money as worthless anyway. So that's why they own real estate. They don't really, I think, consider the fact that they use real estate as money. And we kind of forgot-- actually, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on that as well, because I think as, as, as a human species, in a way, we kind of forgot what money is, because money has been broke for so long that we use so many things for money or as money that we kind of forgot what money is. And now Bitcoin, being near perfect money, kind of teaches us again what money is. So I, I slowly see I see how it dawns on the people that I work with that, that real estate is used as money, Bitcoin might be better money, then they start to think about money in itself. I don't know how you think about it, but I feel like we kind of forgot how good money is, yeah?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:39", "start": 2319.25, "text": "Yeah. I think it's, some of the things, I guess my answer would just be Yeah, there's an inertia, there's institutional bias, like we were talking about, it's easier to get loans for this kind of thing, there's easier, let's say, tax treatment, it's more normalized, I would say, cultural aspects, social aspects, even for me, growing up in Australia, and, you know, I don't live there now, I'm in, I'm in Dubai now, but when I was there, it would be a very, very common thing that people would sort of be, you know, at a barbecue, and they would be bragging to each other Selling it for this much or it's worth this, and I've got the, you know, it, it just, it was a very social cultural expectation that, you know, property is the thing to invest in, and I, I'm sure that's all around the world, right? Not just in Australia. so I think it's just that aspect of it, it was just very normalized. And certainly, of course, you know, when most people had no idea like what is money, what's, what makes a good money, what makes a bad money, they And un, you know, just unaware that they're in water to begin with, right? I think that's just the environment most of us have grown up in, and so to kind of actually have to teach them, wait a sec, there's this thing called fiat money, that's what you're using, fiat currency, and then historically people used gold, and now we've got this new thing called Bitcoin that is a superior money, superior scarcity, all the, you know, the normal things that, you know, we say when we're talking, when we talk about Bitcoin. I think it When you look at content online, content online, right? Like, there's, you know, dividend investing guys who are like, \"Oh, look at this,\" and that, or there's like property-- there's so much property content, right? Because, you know, real estate brokers or real estate people will sort of talk about, \"Oh, here's, here's where you should buy,\" et cetera. look at these properties here that you can buy and you can lever up on that. I think it's-- I think the-- but there's a huge disparity in" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:43", "start": 2442.72, "text": "I don't know how many Bitcoin podcasts there are, but I, I promise you, there's a lot more, you know, real estate podcasts than there are Bitcoin podcasts, and I, I think that's just, that's just where we're at, isn't it?" }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "40:54", "start": 2454.41, "text": "Yes, no, there is. And there's a convergence now because I don't want to be too hard on my real estate investors, because I recently, as you said, I, I'm, for the first time, I gave a presentation in front of a pure, it was a pure real estate And I was invited to speak to a pure real estate investor crowd, so there was around two, one thousand two hundred, investors active in real estate, and they weren't hostile at all. So they were very embraced. They embraced actually what I had to say. And afterwards, I'd say around twenty or thirty people came up to me, and they actually said, \"You know, thank you.\" A light bulb just went up into my head. I, I was, I understood there is something wrong with the system, and within the, the scope of the system, I also understood how to outperform the rate of inflation with real estate, but now I also understood there's another system, and I think that can be helpful because we tend to think always from the system we operate out of, and it can take a while to understand that Bitcoin in itself is a completely new system, and that's why also why Bitcoin exists, it's the thought of that we don't have to de- Destroy what exists, we can just build something different, and that's Bitcoin, and actually it's a bit more fun. it's not as regulated, you can basically live out your dreams more easily because the slogan of the event, event was \"Your Life, Your Terms.\" So a lot of real estate investors, they understand that You don't want to be a slave to the system, and, and Bitcoin, I think is a way to leave the system more easily, and faster than with real estate, if that's what you want." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:37", "start": 2557.47, "text": "When it comes to leverage, I guess there will be people who are exploring this idea of using property leverage to get Bitcoin, right? Because that's one of the cheaper ways that an everyday individual can access some of that cheaper capital, right? Because not everybody, you know, is a public company that can tap the public equity and debt markets. It seems to me that one of the accessible ways for an everyday retail individual is that property loan that they have. And so I'm curious if you're seeing, talk about that or analysis on that kind of idea." }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "43:13", "start": 2593.2, "text": "No, definitely. I would, I would agree with you, because you can do two things. You, if you paid off the debt that you took on to buy the property, you can sell the property and buy Bitcoin. But for example, let's say you have a partner that wants to stay active in real estate, and you constructed a property together, you manage it together, you hold it together, I think that refinancing that property to buy Bitcoin is a great- Great idea. at the moment it's not so easy because interest rates are now depending on which jurisdiction, but they are between three, five, six, up to seven percent, and ten years ago they were below two percent. So let's say you took out a loan At one point five percent, you constructed a property and now you use the rental income to pay back the loan. If you refinance the loan And now you have to pay five percent interest rate or four percent interest rate, you might go bust, right? So refinancing is a great way, I think, to accumulate Bitcoin if you own a property that you don't want to sell. It's just important to pay attention to the interest rates." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:21", "start": 2661.04, "text": "The lead sponsor of this show is BOLD, the best place to buy, sell, and save Bitcoin. For listeners in the US, BOLD lets you secure your financial future with complete peace of mind by integrating a low fee Bitcoin only brokerage with NextGen. And multisig vaults. With Bold, you can smash buy Bitcoin or set a DCA plan for only zero point nine nine percent fees and seamlessly deposit the Bitcoin direct to your Bold Vault. The Bold Vault is a two or three collaborative multisig where you hold two keys and Bold holds one as a redundant backup, protecting against loss or theft. You can use Trezor, Ledger, or cold card hardware wallets to spin up a Bold Vault in just a few minutes, and the Bold Vault is the only collaborative custody vault available with zero monthly fees. They're also offering zero Fees on your first ten thousand dollars of Bitcoin buys and twenty five dollars of free Bitcoin when you buy a hundred dollars of Bitcoin or more. Try Bold today and upgrade your stacking experience over at getbold dot io. And now, back to the show. Yeah, I see. And of course, the timing can matter too, right? Because if you end up sort of buying, let's say you did that and it was the top of the Bitcoin cycle, then, yeah, obviously it's gonna be kind of painful for a few years while you sort of wait. So obviously, the timing does matter in those But nevertheless, if you're, even if you're paying five percent or ten percent, I mean, if Bitcoin is growing much more than that, at least historically, now I guess that's the other aspect of it is that, you know, we're seeing diminishing returns over time. Like I, I think the growth rate of Bitcoin is tapering down. It's still very strong, to be clear. Like I think it's, it's probably on average, like if you're looking at like power law trend and stuff like that, it's probably like forty percent, you know, thirty-six percent, thirty But just tapering down from the crazy levels we saw in earlier years." }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "46:08", "start": 2768.28, "text": "No, I, I totally agree with you, and I have to say that, I just have to say how it is, Bitcoin is more fun. because it is less restrictive. So I, I also got into real estate because I like architecture, I like design. But at this point in time, it's very difficult to actually build what you conceptualize, because usually what we conceptualize in our meetings before we go into construction has to change during construction, because usually the materials we use for building, they actually go up in price, especially in the last five years. So we have a property right now that we're building around 300 units, so it's, it's pretty large. And every three to six months, we have to cut down on the design aspects of the property to be able to stay in line of whatever we thought the building will cost, because wood has got more-- Yeah. Yeah. Wood has gotten more-- Wood has gotten more expensive, so we would like to actually use more wood in our buildings, but that has become very expensive. same with clay, we would like to use clay, but then it's very regulated, for example. Like clay is a building material that you actually see traditionally. If you go into more rural traditional areas, you see people, they build a lot with clay. And clay is great because it keeps heat inside, but it also means that if it's-- if you do want to, to keep to not stay inside, you can open up the windows. So it's, it's just a natural material. And what happened with, with fiat money in the early twentieth century? the Bauhaus architecture school, which in line with standardization standardized the way that we built. And I actually like Bauhaus, I also like, the, interior, design objects that like Mies van der Rohe and some other architects in the time constructed, but I have to say that Throughout, let's say, the last thirty, forty years, because of the rate of inflation, which means that building becomes more expensive, we had to standardize the way that we built in order to save, because you have to, in-- you have to constantly outperform the rate of inflation. So I think that also negatively affects the way that we build, and I think that architecture is a very good example, of the negative effects of standardization, because fiat money isn't the only- reason why we built the way we built today. It's also standardization, but standardization and fiat money, they happened alongside of each other basically since, yeah, since 1913 and since the 1920s, and then after the Second World War, when Europe was de-uh destroyed, a lot of the properties, had to be rebuilt within five years. And you know that when you go, when you wander through the streets of Amsterdam, for example, Amsterdam was a city that wasn't destroyed. The Second World War, and you see these beautiful buildings that maybe took-- some of these buildings took a decade or more to build, and some of these buildings were built by merchants that made their money overseas, and then they came back home, and they wanted construct-- they wanted to construct a property that represented whatever they wanted to represent. But today, if you build a property, you actually mostly build it as a financial asset that you want a rate of return on. You don't really think about it as much as a design option. Anymore, as you maybe did a hundred years ago, because, there's no money left for, for, minum for design." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:42", "start": 2982.23, "text": "Interesting, yeah. And it kind of reminds me of, the book Generosity and Abundance, by Gita Holzman. So listeners might like that book as well, where we sort of went, more into some of these other elements of, you know, why people do some of the things they do and, and the abundance that gets created, kind of in the sound money world versus in the, the fiat About currency, government, status, world we live in today. but let's bring it back to the real estate investment question and the way, real estate investors should shift their thinking, right? Because we have to, I guess, offer them alternatives, right? Because not all of them are ready to just go full Bitcoin. Yes. now maybe that might-- I, I don't know, maybe that is more optimal to just go full Bitcoin and not even worry about property. Maybe that's like the strategy or the other, you know, com-- public treasury companies and things like this Still wanna be involved in real estate development? What are some of the ways that they can incorporate Bitcoin? Is it into the instrument? Is it into, the Bitcoin treasury aspect of it? Is it maybe using Bitcoin as collateral to borrow against so that you can do your business? What are some of the methods you're looking at?" }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "50:54", "start": 3053.79, "text": "Yeah, if you would go far out, if you're an investment company, let's say you're an investment company, you're just looking for a higher return, look at Meta Planet, you could look at what they did. As you said, they sold, m-- they were a company operating, hotels in Southeast Asia. During COVID, they were hit hard and they had no rental income, so their properties were yielding lower returns. They sold most of their properties, bought Bitcoin with it because they're publicly listed, now they can tap the public debt markets and acquire Bitcoin, and they can speed up the investment cycle. And rather than refinancing their real estate portfolio, let's say every five years, they're Refinance their Bitcoin stack every couple of months. That is, I think, if you want, if you're a pure investment company, if you wanna go out far from being a real estate investment company, all to being a Bitcoin company, MetaPlanet would be the best example, I think. But if we go back into more practical strategies for real estate developers I'd say number one, use Bitcoin as a treasury asset and funnel parts of your cash flow into Bitcoin. We, for example, we started doing that in two thousand twenty-four. Recently, I looked at one of the properties, we took ten percent of the renter income and we bought Bitcoin with it, and since we had a good timing because we bought in the depths of the bear market, it now, I think, is worth one hundred sixty percent more than a year ago, while the money that we kept in fiat That lost two percent purchasing power because of inflation. So we usually save around twenty percent of our rental income, and we put half of that into Bitcoin, half of that we keep in fiat because we need to be liquid at times. That's number one, Bitcoin for maintenance reserves. Number two Really look at your real estate portfolio and sell non-core assets. I think, lo-- I don't wanna give any investment advice, that's also very important, because look at your individual properties, but I would consider selling non-core assets, then put the money into Bitcoin. number three, if you wanna keep Your properties, do what you suggested, refinance them to buy Bitcoin, and that allows you to buy Bitcoin on a large scale. But I think it's important to pay attention to interest rates, right? and then- Bitcoin, as you said, is great collateral for lending, so I think it's worth incorporating Bitcoin into real estate development financing. Meaning, if you take out-- it's the same for a homeowner, to be honest with you. So if you are somebody that wants to own a home or you're somebody that develops a property, this strategy applies to both of you. If you take on capital, if you take out a loan, take out additional money to buy Bitcoin as well. If you are a A homeowner, you now have a Bitcoin treasury that hedges against fiat inflation. You have maintenance reserves if, if your window cracks, you have capital that you can either spend or you can e- lend against the Bitcoin and spend fiat money to maintain your property. So you can either sell the Bitcoin in the future or you can lend against it if you don't wanna sell it and spend fiat money. And now if you're a real estate developer I think it's also true if you're a Bitcoin miner. If you operate also in energy, so if you drill oil, this is also true for you. The next time you take out a loan, I would consider to take on additional capital to buy Bitcoin immediately and hold it in the same entity that then- Actually constructs the property, builds the oil, farm, or if you're into energy, that then drills for energy, produces energy. Because Bitcoin is this scarce asset, it's just perfect for having a capital base to operate out of. This is true for every business, I mean, this is true for every business. But now talking from the lens of a real estate developer, I think it's particularly important because of this relationship between Bitcoin and real estate, both being stores Of value, real estate being this physical store of value, Bitcoin being the digital store of value, and usually, and I like to take the example of a car and a horse, like if you would operate, you know, If you would operate in the horse business, say a hundred years ago, and cars came about, you would be smart to maintain your business, to pay your employees, pay back debt, and have cash flow, but slowly, gradually, move over into also maybe building cars, renting ca-cars out, or operating cars. So it's the same if you're active in real estate and you're very good at it, and you have a business that's yielding a nice, return, and you have employees, and everything's going well. I'm, I'm not telling you now stop whatever you're doing immediately, but just consider Bitcoin as this digital store of value to incorporate it in your business structure and then slowly, gradually move, move over and focusing more onto Bitcoin and then, for example, Meta Planet again as the most extreme example, they still operate a hotel, right? They're not-- they didn't stop operating a hotel at all. So actually, if you get into Bitcoin whatever level you choose, I think it can support your core business a lot. You can also see it with strategy. I looked into the, the earnings and they have a forty-eight percent year-on-year growth in subscription, and I think that's because Bitcoin is a good marketing tool for them, so you can see that the core business, which is software, Software as a service or it's, consulting and it's, and it's, consulting for businesses helping them with AI tools to accelerate in their journey, that's also benefiting from their Bitcoin strategy. So Once you start adopting Bitcoin, I think what you'll see over time is that you'll focus more and more on Bitcoin, and then, and then eventually, I think it also helps to, with the core business, whatever that might be, in the case of real estate, it's real estate development and then renting that space out, because we do residential real estate, commercial real estate, I think, if you aren't commercial real estate, I think you might be hit a little bit harder by, what is going to come or what is happening right now, because what is happening right now Now is. Usually, if you work in real estate, you benefit from that because the loan that you take out and you have to pay back into the future, you have to pay back less in nominal terms because inflation just decreases. That's in" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:31", "start": 3450.87, "text": "real terms, but the same nominal, yes. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "57:33", "start": 3453.34, "text": "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have to pay back less in real terms exactly. But what is happening right now is that interest rates had to go up in or-in order to counterbalance inflation, and that means there's less liquidity, there's less demand for real estate. So the value of your property goes down, but at the same time maintenance costs go up because inflation is still rambling right now. It's very hard to, to manage the inflation that is still rambling right now as a result of what happened during COVID, of the expansion of the monetary supply globally. So right now There's less demand and there's higher costs, and that's bad. So the balance sheet, if you look at your balance sheet, on the liability side, you have debt as a real estate developer. Debt goes up as interest rates goes up, the liability side of your balance sheet goes up as well. So now on the asset side, you have real estate. So as interest rates go up, there's less demand for real estate, so your asset side shrinks. So if you're honest to yourself, what is happening right now is asset side is shrinking, liability- The website is growing, so I would consider use Bitcoin to counterbalance that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:41", "start": 3520.9, "text": "Right. To make your asset side still go up and ideally go up faster, of course. And so I guess speaking to competitiveness, of businesses, I think this is a point that's gonna be there for everyone, and you know, even if you look and listen to how, you know, Michael Saylor or, you know, any Bitcoin advocate will tell you, you need Bitcoin in your business so that you stay competitive, because, you know, if you don't, you'll basically get left behind. You Your, as you pointed out, Leon, your asset side is gonna come down, your business competitiveness may suffer, you may not be in a position to pivot or to engage in new projects, whether that's, I don't know, building a new widget factory or to, you know, whatever, to engage in some new business line, if you don't have assets, you don't have a strong balance sheet. So I think this is an important point. So could you spell out for people what does it look like in the future, and I guess, let's say, in the property world, if you Do not consider Bitcoin for your business, what does it mean for you competitively against other real estate companies?" }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "59:44", "start": 3583.9, "text": "Yeah, I think you'll definitely have a competitive advantage if you own Bitcoin. So if you don't own Bitcoin, I think it will be way more difficult. The nominal value of real estate will still grow with fiat inflation. So let's say that, interest rates globally they come back down, let's say to three and a half or three percent over the next couple of years There will be more money flowing into real estate, but once you value your real estate in Bitcoin, not in fiat currency, you'll see the dynamic actually changes. Bitcoin is a, like the new hurdle rate, and once you do that, I think it's important to understand that, yes, the nominal value of your real estate will continue to increase along with fiat inflation, but it's not increasing in Bitcoin terms, right? So that's important to understand, just as a, as a, as a- Mindset, I think that it's important to value your real estate portfolio in Bitcoin and not in fiat currency, so that's, that's very important. And then once you understand that real estate has become so valuable because it's used as a store of value, I kind of think about Bitcoin what I imagine, being someone that works, on a high street and operating a retail store. Let's say you have a retail store in a Sydney high street and it's going very, very well, and it's in the year nineteen ninety-eight. Somebody, a customer comes into your store and he suggests to open up a website. You know, that might sound, a bit far off operating a retail store back then, but actually this was the, the best idea you could do at the time because what you did as a- The retail owner, you actually sold a product to your customer, and the information of the price of the product is what the customer receives once he walks into your store. If you have a website, you can share that information with more people, so more people can buy your products, and you have a more cash flow. So if you work in real estate, the way that I think about real estate, understanding it's a financial asset, it's a store of value. So now tapping into Bitcoin is similar than a Retail operator tapping into the internet because Bitcoin as the digitalization of value opens up a new portal into cyberspace for people to store their value. So in the past, people did it with real estate, in the future, people do it with Bitcoin. So now, if you understand that, you can use your portfolio to accumulate Bitcoin and you tap into the digitalization of value, you tap into this new market that opens up for humanity, and if you do it early on, like right now, you- You benefit from it similar to how Amazon benefited from the internet, and as e-commerce today, I mean, there are still people that don't use the internet, and there will be people in the future that don't use Bitcoin, there will be people that always value real estate. So from a praxeological perspective, people have subjective preferences, right? But because of Bitcoin's absolute scarcity, it becomes obvious that over time humanity will converge into storing their value in the digital realm, not in the physical realm. And right now, they're still doing it in the digital realm, which is real estate. So if you are benefiting from that Be happy about that and use it, leverage that into Bitcoin, because in fifty years, my prediction, I mean, we don't know, and sometimes I think it's a little bit like It's not really worth trying to predict the future, but if you ask me, Leon, what's your feeling? I'd say in fifty years, it's common knowledge that Bitcoin is the better store of value, and people will use Bitcoin by default, and they won't use real estate anymore. So then the question is just, if you understand that, if you have this fifty-year timeframe How, how do you act on it? How do you, how do you deal with it?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:38", "start": 3818.76, "text": "Yeah, I think you, you put it really well there. So, you know, listeners out there, if you're a property person, think about how much of that property you really need to hold versus how much Bitcoin you wanna hold, and of course, how you can use Bitcoin as part of your business, so as Leon pointed out. It's, it can be part of your treasury strategy, it can be part of your refinancing strategy. You could, let's say, sweep your cash flow into Bitcoin. I think, these are probably some of the main, ideas. so it's worthwhile people to, to understand these things because I think the world is gonna change really quickly over the next, who knows, ten, twenty years, and so who knows how quickly it happens. So Leon, before we let you go, where can people find you online and, follow your work and- Keep up with what you're saying." }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "01:04:26", "start": 3866.98, "text": "Yes, first of all, thank you for inviting me on your show. And if people wanna stay in touch, you can find me on X, Nostra Leon Wankum, and I have a newsletter, leonwankum dot Substack dot com, where I share my writing on Bitcoin, real estate, philosophy, and ethics mostly." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:46", "start": 3886.37, "text": "Fantastic. Well, yeah, really great chatting with you, Leon, and of course, listeners, show notes, you can check out the links for Leon there. Leon, thanks for joining me today." }, { "speaker": "leon_wankum", "time": "01:04:54", "start": 3894.71, "text": "Thanks for having me." } ] }